Wednesday, 9 September 2009

It doesn't always symbolise what it seems

Have you ever noticed that when you say, for example, Autism to people they often respond with "Rain man", yet no-one ever says "Winston Churchill", "Luciano Pavarotti" or "Buddha" when you talk about someone who is fat, or "David Blunkett", "Stevie Wonder" or "Helen Keller" when you mention blindness, or "Beethoven", when you mention deafness.

2 Comments:

No, because they have general images or word-pictures of these conditions, and what they might mean. Or they have family members and friends.

Yes, AS-4-L, Kim Peek has agensis of the corpus callosum, which means he has a superbrain on both sides and it is not separated.

I was a very lucky girl that I knew about autism long before Rain Man. Well, at least one or two years before. But over the past 21 years, it has run over in many of the minds we encounter in the public.

That would be an interesting question: 'What did you know/think about autism before you saw Rain Man, or if you haven't seen that film'?